Prerequisites

Debugging Tools for Windows if you plan on creating a full distribution since symstore.exe is used for creating a symbol store from .pdb files.

If you don’t currently have a Windows installation, dev.microsoftedge.com has timebombed versions of Windows that you can use to build Electron.

Building Electron is done entirely with command-line scripts and cannot be done with Visual Studio. You can develop Electron with any editor but support for building with Visual Studio will come in the future.

Note: Even though Visual Studio is not used for building, it’s still required because we need the build toolchains it provides.

Getting the Code

$ git clone https://github.com/electron/electron.git

Bootstrapping

The bootstrap script will download all necessary build dependencies and create the build project files. Notice that we’re using ninja to build Electron so there is no Visual Studio project generated.

$ cd electron
$ python script\bootstrap.py -v

Building

Build both Release and Debug targets:

$ python script\build.py

You can also only build the Debug target:

$ python script\build.py -c D

After building is done, you can find electron.exe under out\D (debug target) or under out\R (release target).

32bit Build

To build for the 32bit target, you need to pass --target_arch=ia32 when running the bootstrap script:

$ python script\bootstrap.py -v --target_arch=ia32

The other building steps are exactly the same.

Visual Studio project

To generate a Visual Studio project, you can pass the --msvs parameter:

$ python script\bootstrap.py --msvs

Cleaning

To clean the build files:

$ npm run clean

To clean only out and dist directories:

$ npm run clean-build

Note: Both clean commands require running bootstrap again before building.

This is caused by a bug when using Cygwin Python and Win32 Node together. The solution is to use the Win32 Python to execute the bootstrap script (assuming you have installed Python under C:\Python27):